New Technologies for Colleges? 86
sinco asks: "I'm on my university's Student Government Association as the position of Vice President of Technology. Our school has currently provided wireless internet, course management software (Blackboard), personal web space for students, the ability to register classes online, and some more tech features. What type of solutions is out there that might enhance the university's technology for students? What type of cool things is your school doing tech wise for its students?"
HA (Score:2, Interesting)
We also have an extremely fast extremely open network. Th
Re:HA (Score:3, Funny)
That is cool! Movable type made a huge difference in 15th century Europe. It is seen as one of the main developments leading to the renaissance. I hadn't realized that they'd started licensing the technology. Wow! what an opportunity. Now we can have our own renaissances.
Re:HA (Score:3, Interesting)
I can't imagine what it would be like to register not-online, its how it always had been for me.
as for your "blackboard"
we use something called "myCourses" which, depending on the teacher, can be utilized alot.
myCourses is web based, which is nice because its accessable in the same format from anywher
Re:HA (Score:2)
I prefer ClassNavigator [classnavigator.com], which was founded by a friend of mine after he saw how poor Blackboard was, and saw the market for an actually GOOD
Re:check out moodle (Score:1)
Tablet PC... (Score:1)
I'm a freshman at Grove City College which has been giving laptops to incoming freshmen since '95 (in a deal with compaq/hp). This year, for the first time, we got HP TC1100 Tablets.
They are wonderful. I take them to class, do all my work on them, read slashdot on wireless during class.... I don't even know what a pencil is anymore.
We have some decent web acessing things for scheduling and such. For some reason, we have to submit schedules by hand to the registrar, but after that we can add/drop classes
Re:HA (Score:2)
When I was at RIT, we were still using DECWriters.
Does the movable type license extend to alumni?
Re:HA (Score:1)
- Each student upon entering the school is provided with a laptop computer. These machines are brand new, and on the cutting edge (at least as far as consumer models go). They are configured to last 4 years, and are covered for accidental damage as well as theft for the
Re:HA (Score:2)
I can never understand when someone says this triumphantly as if somehow this benevolent school somehow materialized the parts and technology for a laptop out of thin air and produces them for free in a basement somewhere.
You should really be saying, "The school requires each student to purchase an expensive laptop as part of the tuition cost." I'm sure it's a very nice laptop, and I'm sure that forcing everyone to buy one does add
Re:HA (Score:1)
enhance (Score:1)
Re:enhance (Score:1)
Re:enhance (Score:2)
Anybody know of any cleanup utilities that can/should be run periodically?
Re:enhance (Score:1)
I think it's fairly platform agnostic, certainly it's been run here on both MySQL and later Oracle, I'm sure the Windows installation will work with M$ SQL
Who are your audience? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're talking about liberal arts crowd, just give them more bandwidth, and perhaps a nice online e-library. The Movable Type licenses sound cool.
Overall, more bandwidth and better administration... Things like streaming video classes would be cool, yeah... And I'm sure you can implement a load of nice geeky features, but it would take geeks to use them.
Student Life Website (Score:5, Interesting)
Little burden on the administration, who pays hardly anything to run the website (student activities pays hosting), incredible benefits to the student body - at a school of around 5000, we get 4500ish uniques a day.
Everyone uses it to find out what's going on - it was an attempt to create a paperless campus, free from those awful fliers and chalkings everywhere.
Just a suggestion for a suggestion. =)
Re:Student Life Website (Score:2)
Re:Student Life Website (Score:4, Informative)
The Original was coded by a recent Graduate, with new improvements being added as time permits.
Re:Student Life Website (Score:2, Interesting)
How is it that both sites are nearly identical in design, yet one of them is completely "in-house"?
Re:Student Life Website (Score:2)
I just emailed the guy who did most of the original design and work.
Trust me, it's all in house. There's a lot of stuff in the code that doesn't even make sense.
Re:Student Life Website (Score:2)
It's a bit cluttered, but the pure density of information is quite nice. As long as users can customize it to get rid of a lot of that extra crap (Google search box? No thanks, I use Firefox) it looks like something I'd really have liked my school to have had.
Free email for life! (Score:2)
What's the big attraction of an email address?!? (Score:2)
From a College administrat
Re:What's the big attraction of an email address?! (Score:1)
College, for some, is one of the most influential parts of a person's life. I wish the college that I graduated from 5 years ago would offer something like this.
Depends on the School (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, gmail will be so passé in a couple years. The school will be constant, at least.
Re:Free email for life! (Score:1)
Very BOFHish. Can you even fit "Hi" into 10 millibits?
Re: (Score:2)
Re:PSU just recommended Firefox over IE (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:PSU just recommended Firefox over IE (Score:2)
Re:PSU just recommended Firefox over IE (Score:2)
Thanks for reminding me why I like working at a liberal, arts college (note the comma). (OK, it's actually a semi-autonomous college within a big state university). It's (usually) much easier to get things done around here.
Last August when Firefox was approaching 1.0, my coworker and I just decided to put it on all the Windows l
You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is one interface for ALL classes.
Now the problems with blackboard. It is a PIECE OF SHIT system. You ever try to take a timed quiz with it? Ha! don't press that back button, pray that your browser doesn't crash. Why? Because when you start the quiz, it records that you "took the assessment", even if you didn't submit. So fi you hit the back button or lose your session, bam! bye bye quiz. Email your professor and beg and plead for your quiz to be reset. If your lucky, you can still get those points.
Submitting papers/homework online with blackboard? Well they have a "digital drop box". I've used it before and it's fairly convenient (as in i'm a lazy fatass who doesn't go to lecture every day). So in the digital dropbox, there are two buttons. ADD FILE and SEND FILE. Alot of people get screwed over by ADD FILE and think, oh the TA will see it. WRONG! You have to either ADD FILE and then SEND FILE or the TA won't see it otherwise. In release 6, they fixed that problem by adding the ability to upload files in SEND FILE. Still, many students find it is fairly confusing to see ADD FILE and SEND FILE next to eachother.
Lastly, emailing people in the class. God damned, I get like 10 of these "spams" from fellow students. Basically when you use the email function of blackboard, it doesn't any information about what class/section it was from. So I end up getting these emails "The first midterm scores were really low, anyone want to get together for a study group?" uh huh...and is this for bio or for history?
Lastly. Information control. With plain old webpages, students can troll the internet to find class information professors are covering. This is especially important if one wants to "preview" a class. Well, with blackboard. Unless your registered in the class, you have no access to it.
In a nutshell. Blackboard sucks.
Forest Grump, Blackboard User [ucr.edu]
Re:You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:2)
Re:You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:2, Informative)
That depends on how the system has been configured, if you click the Modules tab and search by course code you will be able to get "guest" read-only access to the module, providing that it hasn't been turned off at system level or overridden at course l
Re:You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:2)
I enrolled in this business econ class, dropped it because the professor was like "Don't bother buying the book. just come to class is all you need" kinda type. So I'm screwed because I have work friday that conflicts with the class.
So I dropped. I would like the basic info for the class tho, because I still have to take it later.
I hate ilearn/blackboard.
Re:You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:2)
First, in Blackboard 6, the digital drop box has been complemented (and largely superceded) by other much smoother functionality built in to the assignments sections, so that uploaded files are actually associated with assignments.
Secondly, if you can't preview classes, that's due to the way that your admin has set up Blackboard. It certainly contains that functionality. In fact, some schools use it as their web registration -- browse, find the class you like, enroll yourself.
Re:You can start by ditching blackboard. (Score:2, Informative)
(Thought I'd follow up the 'death-to-Blackboard' rants with a constructive suggestion...)
If you want to ditch Blackboard, take a look at Moodle [moodle.org]. It's a dang good PHP-based courseware system that's open source, free (in both senses), very actively developed, and (important for administration types) you can buy support and various other services via Moodle.com [moodle.com]. You could set it up in your personal webspace as a sandbox for people to look at and play with.
Plus, you could have CS students write modules or
ummm, (Score:2)
Don't forget the good old shell (Score:2)
Re:Don't forget the good old shell (Score:1)
Re:Don't forget the good old shell (Score:2)
The risk isn't in letting a student have access to a *nix system or a cli, the risk is in letting a student have physical access to a system. At least on a *nix system you have full accountability and real security.
If your allowing students access to windows systems that can't really be locked down, why would you deny them access to non-server linux systems?
Re:Don't forget the good old shell (Score:1)
The student accessible Linux machines on campus (grccsql and raider) can be connected to remotely (Through telnet, not ssh. AUGH!), so monitoring them live is prohibitively expensive in manpower, if not technicall
You are asking the wrong people (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You are asking the wrong people (Score:2)
His questions were, "What technologies exist?" and "What are other schools doing?" Those are actually pretty good questions for people who are not students of his university.
I agree, of course, that they should only do things that solve local needs. But it's not like he said, "Hey, tell me what I should do here!" Rather than assuming, with no evidence, that he's clueless, it might be more productive to phrase your comment in a w
Re:You are asking the wrong people (Score:2)
Grades (Score:1)
Multimedia kiosks with media writers (Score:2)
Kiosks in the student union [slashdot.org] to: 1. browse trailers of student films and 2. pop in a blank DVD-R to burn the film for viewing pleasure at home, the dorm, apartment, etc.
That's one idea. Another is for kiosks in the student learning center or the library so students can plug their portable mp3 players (or burn CDR) to download lecture audio, student notes (could be from a paid student n
Emerson College: Community Software (Score:2)
This system (We're calling it ECVoices) is for any student, staff, or faculty member to submit an issue of concern about the college to the SGA. Our intent is to bridge the gap
Re:Emerson College: Community Software (Score:2)
It sounds very interesting and would be of great use on our small campus - what license are you thinking of for your work?
Sera
Re:Emerson College: Community Software (Score:2)
The site is a grand experiement so a lot of infustructer may be change when we release in May. But I'll bring it up to the team and start thinking about moving towards that end. The problem is trying to build parts that fit into Emerson College, yet still can be used at other colleges. A pain
Calendar (Score:3, Insightful)
It's really handy to plan your day right on that calendar, around your existing classes. The UCI one is rather fully featured (though I feel sometimes not perfectly intuitive), but I still find it ends up being a nice time-saver.
Raider Card, VMWare, Blackboard, eGRCC, Novell (Score:2, Interesting)
We student workers (GRCC students employed by GRCC) get a credit on our Raider Cards every pay day, independant from our paycheck. It's intended to replace our old parking credit system, but it's still available for my daily vending
DSpace and LOCKSS (Score:1)
We are currently trying to build an institutional repository using DSpace. Open Source and pretty cool:
http://www.dspace.org/ [dspace.org]
In the Library we are testing LOCKSS. It looks like it could go far if it catches on:
http://lockss.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu]
Opera for the Series 60? (Score:2)
wwu frosh here (Score:1)
Re:wwu frosh here (Score:2)
yes.. a good idea (Score:2)
I spent so much time just figuring out my different options... it would be great if the computer just presented every possible schedule configuration for me. As graduation neared, of course the number of configurations for the following quarters and years would dwindle down.
Schedual maker!!! (Score:1)
Re:Public Computers (Score:1)
This class wasnt taking place in my college (RIT has several "colleges," it was in the college of business, and instead of having to walk the whole way to my college, the computer college, I just went to the building right next door to the college of Math and Science. and used one of the open labs there.
Its not really an easily providable service, but having open l
I don't know if the University would sponsor this, (Score:1)
We used to have something like this at Gonzaga, run by some students, until the administration had it shut down.
Don't over-use technology (Score:2)
My university, or at least the program that I'm enrolled in (not Comp Sci) uses computers somewhat minimally. I like it that way.
If anything, encourage profs to upload course materi
improve existing systems / solicit student opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like you are looking for the next big thing. Don't. Instead encourage the university to improve existing systems and processes. For example, consider how students use the online system to register for classes.
At my own university, we have many problems with the registration process. First, virtually every aspect of the process is treated as an independent system. You can not add classes from the same interface that lists descriptions of the classes. You can't view the number of open seats in a class from the signup page. Course descriptions are notoriously vague and inaccurate. This is all just the tip of the ice berg. I don't know if your registration process is as bad as ours, but I would guess there are plenty of technology systems at your university that could similarly stand for improvement.
Part of the fundamental problem in identifying systems that need improvement is that no one ever solicits student (or even faculty/staff) feedback. Sometimes it may be common knowledge that the registration system sucks, but no one ever tells the people responsible for it why it sucks, or how it can be improved. The end result is that people in university offices spend all their time working on the needs of others in nearby offices (the people who express their needs most readily) regardless of whether or not that fits the mandate. Where I work we literally spend weeks preparing an anual report that has little benefit to 99% of the people we serve.
If you did want to create a next-big-thing kind of university initiative, consider partnering with your communications/web standards department to add some kind of interactive feedback mechanism to all online systems. For an idea of how this might work, consider opine-it [opine-it.com]. Basically, imagine a system where every page or system has a corresponding message board that can be accessed directly from a "comment on this page" link.
Most important (Score:1)
i go to UCLA and it's lame that the only hardware discounts we get are 15% off apple products. This is the only 'discount' we get AFAIK. Over at USC each student can buy two ipods for $150 each -- so if your school has the buying power, use the leverage and hook your students up.
Another real cool thing to do is to give away the old hardware to cs/cse students etc. I had
Firewire boot (Score:2)
Really colleges should combine tech and classwork. (Score:2)
Anoter benefit of the program is that cheerleaders could enroll in the class, this eases the enourmous burden placed on them to keep up with both their extracurricular activities and classes. By integrating aerobics into a class which factors into their GPA you've done them a huge favor IMHO.
To really keep up with the times, you could also stream th
Example from my university (Score:2, Informative)
- Access to all my modules
- Download electronic format of lecture notes
- Online examinations and tests (Using perception software)
- Outlook web acces (yuk)
- Online timetbale & calendar
- Online enrollment
- Voyager library system:
- Search the library for books/videos/cd/other media online
- Check which books you have out
- Renew existing loans
- Various other little things...
The entire campus now uses el
moodle.org (Score:2, Informative)
It's got more functionality, open source, and less than a 20 meg setup using mysql and php. You can do content, testing, flash, and it's all easy, with template options, and flexible as far as you want to customize to your ability with CSS graphics etc.
blackboard is in the neighborhood of 100,000 dollars right? I'm pretty sure they do
Southeastern Oklahoma State University! (Score:1)
I'm a student here. Anyway, we have Linux and Windows labs, laptops you can check out in the Library, wireless connectivity in the buildings, wired dorms, webmail, and complete online administrative control (unless we need a sig to register for a class). We also have a VERY serious Math dep't. I'll miss this place when I graduate... back to finals prep now.
SINAPSE (Score:1)
I recommend looking into the SINAPSE Project ( http://www.sinapse.org [sinapse.org]). SINAPSE is a free, open-source student community tool (we like to call it a nexus, not a portal). It's written in PHP (on SourceForge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/sinapse [sourceforge.net]), and it's a strict CMS system (no open editing - each app has controlled input and output). It's Developed at University of Oklahoma (go Sooners!) and run by students there.
You can see it in action at OU (The Sooner Information Network - http://sin.ou.edu [ou.edu]), Bayl